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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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One thing we should keep in mind, when discussing the Merchant Council, is that it does not exist to eliminate ninja super-commerce, but to control and regulate it. I don't know exactly what forms that takes, but the ambiguity means we have the flexibility to shape what sort of regulations the MC imposes to help make the world consistent.

Also, on A-rank mission death rate, 50% is an abstraction apart from the level of the ninja involved. A jounin who takes an A-rank mission is likely to not have anywhere near such bad odds. On the other hand, Minami, a chuunin, has apparently completed about a dozen A-ranks and gave off the atmosphere of someone still learning as opposed to someone with more ninja experience than most will ever reach. Of course, changing Minami's mission numbers is easy enough, so if the numbers crunch differently it would be easier to edit Minami's numbers than to find some way to mix the two, but from her numbers I get the impression that A-rank missions aren't meant to be that dangerous.
 
Cariyaga said:
In fairness, the dude's name is Kid (who would name someone that, anyway???) -- his age seems to be about the same as Hazou's, maybe Akane's presently. I'm not sure he'd be as old as F was in Shippuden?
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Grandma Grandmaster F, obviously. Is that the kind of woman you can say no to?
 
My thought: Ninja techniques aren't that bullshit.

As in my previous example, the masons. You can generate cheap granite blocks that they don't have to haul around. That doesn't matter, because the job isn't done. It's more than just blocks. It's placement, engraving, detailing, etc. Those kind of things can't be rushed.

You have a cobbler not because ninja aren't allowed to compete, but at their technology level, you can't really rush making good shoes or repair them.

I am sure that there are secret justu for cooking food, but it's not like it's hard to make tasty food.

In agriculture, there isn't probably a lot of time spent plowing the fields, but that's probably not where most of the time of a farmer is spent. Most of their time is spent processing food: Separating wheat from the chaff, spinning cottons, etc. What they need is a machine or better tool, not a part-time farmer ninja.
 
From a Doylist perspective, Moloch doesn't violate anything I learned from MCS. To summarize:
  • Nobody, including Hazou, instantly becomes Bill Gates because price must equal marginal cost.
  • The world is not a post-utopian society for the same reason North Korea is not as nice as South Korea.
Working this into the story some post-hoc editing, but I think not that much.

From a Watsonian perspective: trying to root out the root of our divergent beliefs, I agree that people can be irrational, but not that irrational. In particular, I claim (1) trading with ninja doesn't make people a little richer, it makes them substantially richer and (2) this causal chain is zero links long.

(In the Molochian world, people who trade with ninja don't become richer so much as people who don't trade become invaded.)

I would be convinced that MC is plausible if presented with a real-world situation in which a large group of people banded together to make themselves substantially worse-off in an immediately obvious way. So, tobacco quotas wouldn't work, since they don't make anyone substantially worse off and there's several links between "growing tobacco in places that are good to grow tobacco" and "crops that aren't tobacco cost less." Joining the Jonestown cult would count as make a large number of people worse off, but not in an immediately obvious way. The effects of getting wasted are immediately obvious, but it's not clear that it makes people worse off, since many people prefer the effects of alcohol to its costs.

huhYeahGoodPoint said:
the noble clans have gotten behind the idea, as they realized they could lock everybody else out of the market they were already dominating.
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I can totally see noble clans using government power to enforce a monopoly on selling wizardry. In this case, price is still equal to marginal cost (because price is always equal to marginal cost), which is very low, we still have to explain why ninja society isn't post-scarcity (Moloch still works), and civilians do precisely the jobs they have the comparative advantage for, which requires zero government coercion to keep ninja out because ninja are at a comparative disadvantage.


@eaglejarl @Velorien: Velorien has my personal gmail (zook*) from when I (tried to) beta LUtD. I'd be down with double cruxing in chat with either of you, get this worked out with a bit less latency.
 
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Velorien said:
Actually, I think that's fanon. You can tell by how it's sensible. Canonically, I'm pretty sure those are just their actual names.

The few Cloud ninja lucky enough to escape this naming pattern tend to end up with adjectives instead - e.g. somebody out there actually named their daughter "Cold" (Samui).
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So, you're saying that if it's canon, it's actually nonsensical?
 
Velorien said:
"Ya people move fast. Clan trying to consolidate power before the ya-know-what?"

Kurosawa hesitated. "I can make no comment regarding my clan's position or any actions it may or may not be taking."

Grandmaster F grinned. "But ya didn't question what I meant by 'ya-know-what'."

Kurosawa's face shifted from horror into blank politeness so fast Kid barely noticed his initial reaction.
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So from this we can infer:
  1. Something important is going to happen soon.
  2. Cloud was aware of it.
  3. Mist was aware of it.
  4. Cloud wasn't sure whether Mist was aware of it.
  5. Mist didn't want Cloud to know they were aware of it.
  6. Mist wants to be in a powerful position specifically in preparation for this event, instead of just wanting to be powerful in general.
Jiraiya hasn't warned us of any impending event, which is evidence that he isn't aware of it. We also know that Akatsuki works with non-Leaf villages.

So... blatant conjecture, but it's possible that Akatsuki is organising a combined-nations strike against Leaf, and no nation wants to signal that they're on board with this to foreign powers that might not be.


...

Feck.
 
Normally in this situation I would be more than willing to attack this with you fine folks but I have a severe spoon shortage on my end, what with just having started up my own quest. That being said I think the Merchant Council can make sense simply due to the limited number of ninja and the sheer numbers of them that have to be a part of the military due to what amounts to an eternal five way Cold War. This means that, bluntly, there simply are not enough ninjas with their cheating jutsu to make a massive impact on the civilian market.

Only the most influential and largest clans from the largest Hidden Villages can even contemplate being active in the markets, and only then with subpar fighters lest they be caught out by a sudden war as is no doubt about to happen. That being said I doubt the MC will be around much longer considering the revolution in warfare that is about to take place. Even among ninja, Skywalker battles are going to get really messy very quickly. Because of the dicey nature of melee in midair most of the fighting is going to take place at a range, and with massive AoE attacks. FAE devices, Grand Fireball jutsu, various attacks with equivalent water and lightning techniques, and all around chaos will be the order of the day.

Eventually the ninja will have to descend to conventional warfare on the ground to take territory but those FAE devices I mentioned up there? They can be just as lethal or more to ground targets. Speed and range are likely going to become king from a purely strategic standpoint, not a mechanical one as I have not dug deep enough into the crunch of this quest to make that assertion.

Basically only the fastest and best range fighters are going to be utilized in a skywalker on skywalker fight, and not having skywalkers is a massive disadvantage. The prevalence of AoE in these aerial battles, due to the simple fact that single target attacks like kunai are going to be very difficult to hit in these conditions, means having more fighters is in many ways a disadvantage. Higher chances of fighters getting in each other's way, and the fairly large amount of ground they would need to cover to get out of these AoE attacks makes large numbers of chunin, which as far as I can tell are the backbone of the EN's military for full scale war, a hindrance rather than a benefit.

That is just my assessment and I do not claim to be an oracle on the matters of conflict, but in my eyes we are about to have a bunch of out of work low to mid level chunin in the near future of this world. They would more or less be relegated to civilian protection, chakra beast killing, and market pursuits.

Again just my opinion. Dont expect replies quickly or at all by the by. I should not have taken this much time to think on this as is but I always like attempting to lend a defoliating agent to any intellectual thicket I come across.
 
MadScientist said:
So from this we can infer:
  1. Something important is going to happen soon.
  2. Cloud was aware of it.
  3. Mist was aware of it.
  4. Cloud wasn't sure whether Mist was aware of it.
  5. Mist didn't want Cloud to know they were aware of it.
  6. Mist wants to be in a powerful position specifically in preparation for this event, instead of just wanting to be powerful in general.
Jiraiya hasn't warned us of any impending event, which is evidence that he isn't aware of it. We also know that Akatsuki works with non-Leaf villages.

So... blatant conjecture, but it's possible that Akatsuki is organising a combined-nations strike against Leaf, and no nation wants to signal that they're on board with this to foreign powers that might not be.


...

Feck.
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Good thing we're gonna weaponize civvies, huh?
 
MadScientist said:
So from this we can infer:
  1. Something important is going to happen soon.
  2. Cloud was aware of it.
  3. Mist was aware of it.
  4. Cloud wasn't sure whether Mist was aware of it.
  5. Mist didn't want Cloud to know they were aware of it.
  6. Mist wants to be in a powerful position specifically in preparation for this event, instead of just wanting to be powerful in general.
Jiraiya hasn't warned us of any impending event, which is evidence that he isn't aware of it. We also know that Akatsuki works with non-Leaf villages.

So... blatant conjecture, but it's possible that Akatsuki is organising a combined-nations strike against Leaf, and no nation wants to signal that they're on board with this to foreign powers that might not be.


...

Feck.
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Do remember that Mist had been plotting going to war with Leaf for a long time, only that the rugs had been pulled under them for a few weeks now.

I think everyone's gearing up for a shinobi world war, but with the recent announcement, things gotten a lot worse for Mist.
 
eaglejarl said:
Well, this is problematic. I don't see a way for both of the following to be true:
  1. @bayesclef is correct in asserting that the worldbuilding is comprehensively flawed
  2. This is a rational quest in which people behave in realistic ways and logical consequences happen
If the "these economics are utterly wrong!" argument is correct then I see no attractive solutions to this issue. Retconning the prior chapter doesn't help because none of the setting would look like it does if ninja were using their magic for economics on a mass basis. Literally everything would be different.

For the record, @bayesclef, I'm still not convinced by your assertions. For clarity, this is what I've understood of the discussion so far:

QMs: There's a loose constellation of cartels going on.

bayesclef et al: That could not possibly be like that because it is more in people's interests to have the ninja do economic work.

QMs: You're right, it is. However, it's in the interests of the ruling elite for things to stay the way they are.

bayesclef et al: That could not possibly be like that because it is more in people's interests to have the ninja do economic work. The Merchant Council are merchants and so they want cheaper inputs. Also, black markets are endemic IRL.

My responses to the above would be (a) the rich merchants care more about not becoming poor than they care about becoming a little richer (b) people are stupid, self-interested, and easily swayed (see climate change deniers and the continued use of fossil fuels in the real world) and (c) are you sure there isn't a black market? Jiraiya alluded to 'cheating' on both sides.

In any case, I would ask that the hivemind help us figure this out. If the worldbuilding is flawed then we need to fix it. This is what the world looks like and we aren't going to retroactively turn it into a post-scarcity paradise, thereby undoing 3/4 of a million words of writing. We as a group, players and QMs, need to come up with the minimal set of changes necessary to make the setting work. That might mean adding new elements, changing population numbers, changing available resources, or something else, but an answer must be found if we're going to continue forward. We've put forward a solution that we think is plausible so at this point you need to either accept it or help change it to something that we and everyone else can accept.
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I assumed that yes, the common people would be better off without intentionally imposing scarcity on themselves, but not enough people realized that. That's rather like the real world, in which we habitually hurt ourselves with protectionist policies for exactly the same reasons as the Merchant's Council is depicted as doing instory.
 
MadScientist said:
So from this we can infer:
  1. Something important is going to happen soon.
  2. Cloud was aware of it.
  3. Mist was aware of it.
  4. Cloud wasn't sure whether Mist was aware of it.
  5. Mist didn't want Cloud to know they were aware of it.
  6. Mist wants to be in a powerful position specifically in preparation for this event, instead of just wanting to be powerful in general.
Jiraiya hasn't warned us of any impending event, which is evidence that he isn't aware of it. We also know that Akatsuki works with non-Leaf villages.

So... blatant conjecture, but it's possible that Akatsuki is organising a combined-nations strike against Leaf, and no nation wants to signal that they're on board with this to foreign powers that might not be.


...

Feck.
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Keep in mind that the Iron Nerve means that every single movement of a Kurosawa in these situations is conscious and deliberate, even or especially if they don't think that the opponent knows that.

Anyway, it could have been referring to either the imminent world war, or something internal in Mist. It sounds like something internal, though that could include an imminent declaration of war.
 
Lailoken said:
Keep in mind that the Iron Nerve means that every single movement of a Kurosawa in these situations is conscious and deliberate, even or especially if they don't think that the opponent knows that.

Anyway, it could have been referring to either the imminent world war, or something internal in Mist. It sounds like something internal, though that could include an imminent declaration of war.
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Kurosawas can have expressions that aren't IN-derived, just look at all the times Hazou gave information away from his movements. This isn't to mean that the Kurosawa wasn't pretending to pretend that he was being stupid, just that the reasoning isn't airtight.

As for the "what the fuck is going on"...I'm going with @MadScientist on this one.
 
Cariyaga said:
I figured it was the new kage in Mist being crowned.
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Possible, but it's been over a month. Of course, Mist was hit harder then Leaf, loosing Yagura, Mei and Zabuza kinda wiped out two of the next two possible Kage, so it might be a more complex situation then in Leaf.

Maybe it means the complete takeover of Hot springs? Maybe Mist was/is trying to unite both villages & countries?

Could also mean WW4.
 
Well, there obviously wasn't negotiation between Cloud and Mist (unless they had reason to believe a third party was playing witness), and I'm not sure that Rock is close enough geographically, even at ninja speed, to properly sync mass movements...
 
On a meta note, eaglejarl has said that he's excited for the next arc, and Oli has said that something's going to happen "that will make staying in Leaf for much longer difficult".
 
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail

Re: merchant council. Here are some attempts at justifications behind it:
1) Society existed prior to chakra becoming a thing, so this is in some sense, something left over from a time beforehand
2) Merchants hire ninja to do C rank missions which are essentially "use jutsu X to do thing Y." Ninja ride the line on how many offers they accept to extract as much money as possible from merchants
3) There's religious, sociological, or scientific reasons behind ninja not using their powers to just build up society
a) Religious: the cult of the six paths (or whatever international conspiracy) regulates use of jutsu for similar reasons that The Watchers are said to regulate sealing - being frightened of power
b) sociological: The world didn't naturally evolve with chakra in it - chakra only came about a couple hundred years ago, and so this is something that hasn't been optimized yet (pretty much the same thing as 1) )
c) Scientific: using jutsu is more dangerous than has been stated in the story or has some drawback, either known now or rumored and possibly known in the past (e.g. maybe there's a set amount of chakra in the world, or a person's coils can only pass so much chakra before being exhausted, or chakra constructs are bad for your health (so a minor mistake would kill someone), or all things made by jutsu are inherently temporary)

Now, it's quite likely that none of these things would prevent the final solution of "people use chakra to do everyday tasks and life is honestly pretty easy," but they'd put enough roadblocks that it'd likely take a fair amount of determination, strong-arming, and coercing from someone trying to get the world into a post-scarcity society that it's reasonable that the world as it currently is, which has been portrayed as paranoid, unstable, changing, and excessively militarized would not have reached such a point.
 
faflec said:
Kurosawas can have expressions that aren't IN-derived, just look at all the times Hazou gave information away from his movements. This isn't to mean that the Kurosawa wasn't pretending to pretend that he was being stupid, just that the reasoning isn't airtight.

As for the "what the fuck is going on"...I'm going with @MadScientist on this one.
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They can, but they can also completely prevent it to a superhuman degree if they're prepared, and if a designated diplomat is going into international negotiations with an S-Class ninja without that preparation he's in way over his head.

-which is a possibility. This isn't the previous negotiator, and if things are shaking up in Mist they may have pulled back everyone but the scrubs to deal with it.
 
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Nejiranu said:
Normally in this situation I would be more than willing to attack this with you fine folks but I have a severe spoon shortage on my end, what with just having started up my own quest. That being said I think the Merchant Council can make sense simply due to the limited number of ninja and the sheer numbers of them that have to be a part of the military due to what amounts to an eternal five way Cold War. This means that, bluntly, there simply are not enough ninjas with their cheating jutsu to make a massive impact on the civilian market.
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If ninja are too few to make a significant impact on the civilian economy, then there wouldn't be a merchant council created to prevent ninja from having a significant impact on the economy.

But wizardry is enough to make a significant impact. I conservatively estimated that 1 Hazou can do the work of 400 masons (who would then specialize doing things Hazou couldn't). If we say 0.5% of the population is ninja and that they can only work 10% of the time, that's still a 20% productivity increase. The actual number is drastically higher because of ninja you keep around not on active duty in case someone decides to invade.

Raxner said:
we habitually hurt ourselves with protectionist policies for exactly the same reasons as the Merchant's Council is depicted as doing instory.
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This is a really good point and I feel dumb for not having noticed it before. (Then again, my only background in macro is micro.) I'm not entirely sure it works:

Preston McAfee said:
No political situation appears more extreme in this regard than that of refined sugar. There are few U.S. cane sugar producers (nine in 1997), yet the U.S. imposes quotas that raise domestic prices much higher than world prices, in some years tripling the price Americans pay for refined sugar. The domestic sugar producers benefit, while consumers are harmed. But consumers are harmed by only a small amount each, perhaps twelve to fifteen cents per pound – which is not enough to build a consensus to defeat politicians who accept donations from sugar producers
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US consumers are hurt $.12-.15 / pound of sugar in the most extreme case. 3D-printing a house is kind of analogous to building with MEW, which would save consumers on the order of 10^5 dollars. I expect construction companies to put up some sort of fight once the tech gets good enough for wide availability, but I don't expect them to win because 10^5 is a lot more than $.15. Especially when you see house 3D-printers as you go about your daily life.
 
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